Divorce – A Gift of Love

by Cherise Holt, Australia

When I was 21 I married my best friend and in total we shared 11 years of our life together. Our relationship was happy and loving. We were easy going and always made sensible, grown up decisions for ourselves. We were great with our money, dedicated to our work and study, we had built our dream family home and planned out our future together. Our motto was ‘together forever’and we would add ‘TF’ to the end of almost every text message and post-it note.

When I first saw my practitioner 20 months ago I had introduced myself, spoken about work, food, lifestyle and I slipped in “I should also mention my husband has suddenly left one month ago”.I had felt the shock of the situation but I never felt that I was a victim of it or of him. I had never asked him to come back to me because even though he struggled to give me a few reasons as to why he was leaving he had said to me “he didn’t feel like he was being himself”. Amongst the questions that I had in my own head I couldn’t deny that these words he had spoken were completely true. I could feel exactly what he meant by them and I could see it in his eyes.

The divorce process for me was nothing like I would have previously perceived one to be or had seen it play out in other relationships in life. I learnt that it was not a situation to be ashamed of or to feel we had failed. I was given the gift of grace and space to allow myself to be with me and to begin to unfold who I truly was. I have an abundant amount of appreciation for this, for I too was feeling that there was more to being me.

Once I had even nominated this to him and to those close around me, that I was looking to be more confident, yet I was still looking outside of myself for the answers. I was numbing my inner discontent with food and wanting so desperately to have a baby, for this was the next step for us and even through my numbness I could feel that this could be a solution to bring more love into our lives.

I continued with my practitioner to have Esoteric Chakra-puncture sessions and introduce new self loving ways into my life. My practitioner was supporting me but it was me choosing to become more self loving, for me. She was simply sharing the self loving ways in which she lives her life. As this self love for me was growing I was supporting myself to make true decisions. My ex husband had thanked me for being amicable through the whole process to which I replied, “I was just being me”. Friends would say “have you heard from him, how is he doing, so long as you are doing a little better than him, right?!” to which I truly felt to say, “no not at all, I wish for him every happiness in his life”. Keeping in any contact with me was not his wishes, this I respected. Amazingly though I have found so much love for who he is. More love than the amount I ever held for him in over the decade we were together. In fact, as much love for him, equally so, as I now have for myself. Just this past weekend my 10 year old nephew asked of his whereabouts and why he had left, It was so lovely to share honestly with him. He asked me to name two things that I had liked about him, and before I knew it I had easily given him three.

We said ‘I love you’and hugged each other every single day we were together, right up to the night before he left, yet those words feel so empty in comparison to the true love that I now feel. Have you ever heard the term “you can’t love anyone else until you love yourself”? This actually makes so much sense to me now.. for how could we have truly loved each other so much and yet were not connected to the great amount of love that we simply already are . .

I have discovered that I am love. I am blossoming to show this love to myself each and every day and in turn I cannot help but want to be this love to others who I know and meet.

I have received many beautiful compliments of how well I have handled this experience in my life. A doctor at my work said to a fellow nurse “wow, if this is what a divorce can bring, everyone should go through one”. What he was seeing was not the divorce exactly, but me beginning to truly take care of myself and nurture my body.

This true love I feel is creating a confidence in me and a support of myself that I had never experienced before.

I have abundant appreciation for the loving support that I have felt from my practitioners, Serge Benhayon, Universal Medicine and myself as I continue to unfold who I am and excitingly discover the true love that is deep within me. It is present within each of us and is the most exquisite gift you will ever receive.

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193 thoughts on “Divorce – A Gift of Love”

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It’s very beautiful to read this again. It makes sense that we think love comes from outside of us and as a result we may change who we are to feel acceptable to others in our search for love. Everything you have shared Cherise is very inspiring, what I can feel is the steady, accepting, and holding way you were able to offer to your ex-partner (and yourself) as a natural expression of you once you reconnected to the love inside of you. Love enfolds people with understanding and the acceptance is unconditional.

We are so easily fooled by the word love; it means so many different things to so many people. We are not encouraged as children to stay in connection to the essence (love) that we naturally bring into this world.

Why do we pretend to be someone else in the most intimate relationship we will have? There is so much to unravel about why we deny ourselves in our most intimate relationships but surely the root of it is a fear of not being accepted for who we are? Yet, as you have shared, if we are not embracing who we are, then whoever we are with will not be able to embrace that either.

When you stop and think about it, the simple comment that your ex husband made that he felt he wasn’t being himself spoke volumes of where he was at Cherise, and I can really appreciate his honesty and the courage it would have taken to say it.

I have discovered that in a relationship, if you are not free to leave, you are not free to stay. In that freedom there is the space to be who we truly are – and that is a wonderful gift as Cherise shares here.

What a beautiful Love story – true Love story as love for another person does not mean buying flowers or leaving the rose pettles on the bed – it is simply to give each other the space and grace to be wherever we are at.

So often marriage can be like a blanket that dampens the light within both people (a comfort blanket where we don’t really have to shine to the outside world because its easier to just shine to the other person). Its great to hear an experience of someone who throws off the blanket and then the rest of the world goes ‘wow’ where has that been hiding!

I am discovering that we generally lack of tools to express the small and deep hurts we feel that means there are festering wounds that deepen till they come out like a putrid mess. The relationship we have with ourselves is fundamental to recognising when something hurts and offers the opportunity for expression on both sides without such fundamental breakdowns.

It is true Lucy, it’s something that I often ponder on as well, and that is we don’t truly know how to support ourselves in the many experiences we have and their impacts. An elder relative told me that “we aren’t taught to feel, or to deal with what we feel” and that she’s spent her life working on that. We may in some respects be prepared for life by education, but largely as human beings the support we need is absent. For me it’s only been available through Universal Medicine via the presentations and the Universal Medicine therapies. True support is something we are all very worthy of, and Serge is leading the way in offering this.

Divorce does not need to be vitriolic, it is the hurts that we feel from the lack of expression throughout the relationship that feed the self-preservation behaviour. I do feel that if we learnt to express how we feel more, there would be less build up and separation and divorce could be more of a mutual understanding as yours came to be.

And there is the crux of the ‘issue’ I suspect. What is each person’s perception of the purpose of a relationship or marriage? If there is no understanding of the support that can be offered to each other to evolve, then this growth will not be appreciated and the ‘hurt’ will ravage the separation.

“I was given the gift of grace and space to allow myself to be with me and to begin to unfold who I truly was.” – So often marriages get filled with so many activities with each other and children that are actually used as distractions to not really get in touch with and feel who we truly are inside, rather than use outer accomplishments, activities, and roles to identify us; which always seems to result in an unsettlement and emptiness.

Why people opt out of a marriage is always personal. Unless there is mutual agreement, the situation is often the result of the wish of one of the parts. When this happens, the situation is a difficult one since you have to cope with a decision of being unchosen. The hurt that this situation evokes provokes an instant reduction of the whole of life to this point. It is very easy to get lost in this sea of emotional drama in which you are seemingly required to change how you feel for the other one and stop loving him/her. That is easily done if hurts were triggered or provoked, but not that easy if this did not happen. The point is that divorces always confront with what did you truly feel for the other one and independently of what you got in exchange for your love, it is your privilege to choose whether to remain true to that feeling or to change it.

Something I learnt recently is that I observed two of my ex-partners move into new relationships. One moved into a relationship that is very gorgeous and loving and one moved into a relationship where he is less of himself. I was surprised by what I felt when I observed this. I was more affected by the partner who moved into the relationship where he was less of himself – it was devastating to feel what he had chosen. The other partner I felt total joy because he stepped into something I was inspired by and could feel the love and truth in it and could feel how by this choice we would get more of him.

Great story to share. How many of us have entered relationships and then not been able to love fully, simply because we have been taught that to love ourselves is wrong. But as you say, unless we love ourselves first we cannot fully love another. So in my experience this lack of love in a relationship results in an emptiness that both can feel, but neither knows how to change this.

A relationship between two people who know self-love first is so very different to one based on seeking love in the other. When two self-loving people come together it is more a case of ‘what can I bring to the relationship?’ rather than ‘what can I get from this?’ We come bearing gifts rather than hopes and wishes.

“I have discovered that I am love. I am blossoming to show this love to myself each and every day and in turn I cannot help but want to be this love to others who I know and meet.”
This is so very true, the more love I hold myself with the more love I share with others. This feels so beautiful, as no amount of telling another you love them comes even close to saying nothing but feeling absolute love for another.

This is a great sharing Cherise, to actually honour each other and admit that your relationship was stoping each of you from being who you truly are, and through the space divorce has offered you a chance to reconnect to the love you truly are.

This is such a beautiful, and deeply inspiring blog. I love what you say about how being self-loving supports us making true decisions. It is very beautiful to feel your commitment to live in this way.

In this article I can feel that the key to ‘going through’ any challenging situation in life is to bring to it all of ourselves. To love ourselves dearly and be able to understand the situation we find ourselves in and most importantly surrender to the true path of living love in our lives that our bodies desperately want to live by.